Pentatone to Celebrate Conte’s 70th Birthday

This coming Friday, Pentatone will release a new album whose full title is Intimate Voices: Chamber Music of David Conte. As is usually the case, Amazon.com has already created the Web page for pre-orders of the recording. Conte has received a moderate amount of attention on this site. He is, after all, “local talent,” teaching composition at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. It was through the Conservatory that I first met him; and, while our exchanges have been relatively seldom, they have consistently been informative (at least from my point of view). I should also note, by way of disclaimer, that I have become familiar with several of the musicians performing Conte’s music on this new release.

David Conte (center) with Kevin Rivard (left) and Kevin Korth (right) (courtesy of PENTATONE)

The album concludes with Conte’s second piano trio, a four-movement composition performed by Samuel Vargas on violin, cellist Matthew Linamen, and Kevin Korth on piano. The four preceding works are all duos for piano with a different instrument. In “order of appearance,” these are as follows with the names of the performers corresponding to the instruments in the title:

1. “Elegy for Violin and Piano” (Samuel Vargas and Kevin Korth)
2. “Aria and Fugue for Cello and Piano” (Emil Miland and Miles Graber)
3. “Sonata for French Horn and Piano” (Kevin Rivard and Kevin Korth)
4. “Sonata for Clarinet and Piano” (Jerome Simas and Eric Zivian)

This is a decade’s worth of music, composed between 2014 and 2024. Conte was born on December 20, 1955, meaning that he will turn 70 at the end of this year. Following his graduate studies (master’s and doctoral) at Cornell University, he traveled to France where, between 1975 and 1978, he was one of the last students of Nadia Boulanger. As a result, he cultivated a rhetoric of lyricism in sharp contrast to the obsession with higher mathematics, which had invaded the efforts of those contemporary composers based in universities such as Columbia and Princeton.

What draws me to this album is Conte’s capacity to find just the right rhetorical devices for each of the instruments he selects for his compositions. This is far from a one-thing-after-another listening experience. The journey through the album is somewhat like opening the doors to a series of five different rooms. However, these are not the sinister room’s of Béla Bartók’s “Bluebeard’s Castle.” Rather, each room is graciously inviting in its own way. The attentive listener can enjoy the satisfaction of both lingering and then moving on to the next option!